A week on the web: Stop Kony

Charity Invisible Children shone a spotlight on the alleged atrocities carried out by Ugandan guerilla group leader Joseph Kony this week. The charity posted an extraordinary film on Vimeo – but soon found itself under as much scrutiny as Kony. Here’s what the web made of it all

Joseph Kony is the leader of Ugandan guerilla group the Lords
Resistance Army. He has been accused of inflicting appalling atrocities on
children in Uganda – up to 60,000 are said to have been abducted by his army.

Until this week,
he wallowed in relative obscurity. But then a charity made this video…

The film was approaching 27m views at the time of writing, which surely makes it the most
successful viral campaign ever launched online. It’s an extraordinary number
for such a long documentary on such a harrowing subject.

The campaign to
highlight Kony’s activities quickly spread to Twitter.

The organisation
that made the film, Invisible Children, quickly came under fire. It’s hard to
challenge a charity that seems to be trying to do some good in the world, but people
on Twitter smelt a rat.

And plenty of
people have done their research. These posts (and many more like them) were
linked to repeatedly on Twitter:

“It would
be great to get rid of Kony. He and his forces have left a path of abductions
and mass murder in their wake for over 20 years. But let's get two things
straight: 1) Joseph Kony is not in Uganda and hasn't been for 6 years; 2) the
LRA now numbers at most in the hundreds, and while it is still causing immense
suffering, it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people
are going to help deal with the more complicated reality.” (Source:
foreignpolicy.com)

“In the end, ‘Kony
2012′ falls prey to the obfuscating, simplified and wildly erroneous narrative
of a legitimate, terror-fighting, innocent partner of the West (the Government
of Uganda) seeking to eliminate a band of lunatic, child-thieving, machine-gun wielding
mystics (the LRA). The main beneficiary of this narrative is, once again, the
Ugandan Government of Yoweri Museveni, whose legitimacy is bolstered and – if
the ‘Kony 2012′ campaign is ‘successful’ – will receive more military funding
and support from the US.” (Source: justiceinconflict.org)

Really? This article puts another spin on that. The final paragraph
quotes Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, a political scientist and a senior research
fellow at the Institute of Social Research, Makerere University: “Why would
Kony prevent the Americans from accessing Uganda’s oil if he is hiding in
Central African Republic? That’s a misplaced assumption because for the
Americans to have access to Uganda’s oil, American oil companies must be here,
they must be involved in the exploration. There is not a single American
company here.”

The speed with
which the debate has progressed in the social media world was baffling for
many, including our own Charlie Brooker.